


If The Heavens Ever Did Speak

by CloudAtlas



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abandonment, Alternate Universe, Angst, Dystopia, Gen, Leaving, Museums, almost human - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-28 20:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3868690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudAtlas/pseuds/CloudAtlas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It was supposed to take everyone. But it didn’t, because the world was already stranger than usual before ‘it’ tried to make it stranger still.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Wherein the world ends not with a bang, but a whimper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If The Heavens Ever Did Speak

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/gifts).



> A belated birthday present for **inkvoices** , after a conversation that went from ‘dystopian AU’ to ‘ruined museums’ and ‘burning Vermeer’s for warmth’ very, very quickly.
> 
> This isn't compliant with anything much. Thank you to **AlphaFlyer** for beta. Romanian from Google Translate; title from Take Me To Church by Hozier.

Natasha thinks it was supposed to take everybody – whatever ‘it’ was. Something alien, she assumes, because everyone just  _went._ She wakes up one morning and the rest of the world was gone in the blink of an eye; no distress signals, no warning, nothing. She calls SHIELD but gets no one, she calls the Tower to the same effect and then, dread curling in her stomach, she calls Clint.  


He picks up after one ring with a terse “Everyone’s gone”, terror evident like water under thin ice, and Natasha releases a breath she hasn’t even know she’d been holding.

Thus begins the Devil’s Round Robin, increasingly panicked calls around the now-empty globe to phones that ring and ring and ring until _there_ – Steve and Bucky in Brooklyn, and _there_ – Pepper at the Tower. But now the feeling is worse, because Fury doesn’t pick up, and Hill doesn’t pick up and Natasha tries Sam and Sharon and Bobbi and Melinda and none of them pick up until Clint rings back and says ‘Banner’s woken up to an empty slum in Kolkata’ and the sudden realisation kicks in.

Tony will not pick up, if she rings him. Neither will Colonel Rhodes. But… Jane Foster will. And, Natasha thinks with a jolt, Erik Selvig will. Because… _oh God_. If Clint is here Erik will be here and Natasha has never wanted to thank Loki for _anything_ before but Clint is _here_ , and if Clint is here that means Loki –

She wrenches her mind away because it’s not a useful line of thought.

Pepper’s in the Tower and Tony will never pick up. Natasha rings Steve and snaps “find Pepper now” and prays in a way she’s never done before _in her life_ that she is wrong.

But Clint is on the other end of a phone saying “I’ve got Doctor Foster” and Tony doesn’t pick up his phone and Natasha has been wrong about things before, but she’s not wrong about this.

 

It was supposed to take everyone. But it didn’t, because the world was already stranger than usual before ‘it’ tried to make it stranger still. Natasha found everyone she could, using a mixture of Thor’s Asgardian friends and all human methods of communication before the safety mechanisms kicked in and the electricity cut out, blackout after blackout until she could see the stars in Moscow, and probably in New York, in London, and Shanghai too.

The human leftovers are not quite who she expected though, once they all manage to find each other, meeting up in the courtyard in front of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, of all places. There are those she understands: Bruce and his gamma radiation; Steve, Bucky and herself with their variations on the super soldier serum; Pepper with Extremis; Jane with the Aether, and Clint and Erik, who’ve had a god in their head. And of course, Thor.

But then there’s Carol, who is an unknown, and Pietro and Wanda, siblings who, respectively, move at inhuman speeds and have powers and abilities that explode out of them unexpectedly. They’re dangerous and volatile but Thor insists they are as human as anyone else in their group and regardless of their abilities, everyone agrees they are just as worth saving.

And then there’s Pepper’s companion – because Tony built friends and Tony was a genius and Tony’s timing was impeccable – who flies like Iron Man and gleams like Bucky’s arm and says ‘Agent Romanov’ like JARVIS did.

But there’s no ‘Agent Romanov’ any more. It’s just Natasha now, painfully aware of how much she’s been changed.

So here they are, the last of humanity – or maybe not, because if they were totally human they would be gone as well – holed up in a museum for the night, the _last_ night.

 

They had liberated some flashlights from a hardware store a couple of days ago, but against the size of the exhibition rooms they have little effect; the light swallowed by the echoing dark.

It had been Steve’s idea. For what is coming next they don’t need food more than what could be taken from any abandoned café or supermarket, and somehow breaking into a house or apartment had seemed like a gross invasion privacy, despite there being no one left whose privacy they could invade. So Steve had suggested a museum and everyone had agreed, led by some collective masochistic streak that felt as though spending the last days on earth amongst the proof of all that humans had ever accomplished is the right thing to do, if not the most enjoyable.

Now, as they walk around the dark exhibition spaces, Pepper’s companion – who Natasha can’t call JARVIS because JARVIS had been a voice, but who she can’t call anything else because no other name had been given – provides information on all the exhibits, a melodious and even voice drifting through the darkness, telling of millennia of fallen kingdoms. Of conquest and suffering and great victories.

Not-JARVIS’s voice drifts into silence as they enter a long, thin room lined with shelves and cabinets, its far end lost in shadowy darkness. Natasha’s doesn’t know why, but collectively they stop in the entryway, not quite able to go any further.

Eventually, instead of not-JARVIS, it’s Jane who speaks up. “I learnt that…” and then a pause. “After… after Greenwich I came – I learnt that… in – only about two of the things in this room have real historical value. Everything… everything else was just… in storage.”

Natasha squints into the darkness, trying to make out more than marble busts and stuffed birds.

“I don’t…” Jane’s voice comes out so small, swallowed up by the dark. “I don’t want to leave.”

Clint’s hand suddenly clamps down, hard, on Natasha’s wrist.

“We can’t just _leave_ ,” Jane whispers.

But they are leaving tomorrow.

There’s a yawning, gaping hole in Natasha’s chest. A void, as huge and dark as the room she stands in, and into it falls everything the world ever was, everything it is now, and everything it could have been – a singularity, crashing through her ribcage and all the soft parts of her, heavy but small enough that she can’t hold it without it slipping through her fingers; small and _alive_ and tasting of home.

She turns to face Jane – everyone turns to face Jane – and finds her hunched so small, her hands twisted into the fabric of her t-shirt. And of course it was Jane who voiced it; Jane, who looks to the stars with her feet on the ground. The only one to have left before, voicing the overwhelming desire to _stay_.

“I thought it might be a good idea,” Erik says into the thick silence, and everyone’s focus shifts, “just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward.”

“No…” says Jane softly.

“From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail – ”

“Erik, please.”

Jane’s pleading and Natasha doesn’t understand what Erik is referencing, what he could be saying to make Jane look as though her heart is being torn out in inches.

“ – our planet would just be a point of light, a lonely pixel. Hardly distinguishable from the many other points of light Voyager would see; nearby planets, far off suns.”

He’s quoting something, Natasha realises; his speech pattern switching from his usual musical Swedish cadence to oddly stressed American.  And it must be reasonably well known as well because Clint recognises it, if the way he stiffens is anything to go by, and Natasha can see from the look on Pepper and Bruce’s faces that they recognise it too.

“But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.”

Erik’s gaze is fixed at a point just over Steve’s shoulder, an unseeing stare, ignoring completely the dark and those around him. As Erik continues, Natasha grips Clint tighter while, almost reluctantly, letting her gaze drift – over the shells and fossils and birds eggs encased in glass along the walls, over the hand axes and rock samples and the overwhelming evidence of Earth’s _life_.

“It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos. But no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance and perhaps also our last, for decades to come.”

Erik takes a deep breath and in the brief silence, no one moves.

“So, here they are,” he continues softly, “a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets and a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there is some special significance to this small world. But it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture – ”

And almost simultaneously the group tenses. It’s too horrible, how fitting this is.

“ – not our reworking of the Earth’s surface, not our machines, not ourselves. From this vantage point our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence.”

Erik stops again, his breath hitching imperceptibly as if what he’s to say next hurts too much.

“We are too small,” he says, his voice breaking over those four words, and Natasha can hear the hitches in people’s breathing, the furious blinking back of tears. “On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential; a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.”

Erik takes another deep, shuddering breath, the flashlights throwing his face mostly into shadow as he turns to look down the room, before gazing over to where Jane is tucked tightly under Thor’s arm.

“Consider again,” he says, his voice thick with unshed tears, “that dot.”

Clint’s hand traces the edge of the nearest cabinet, and he says; “That’s here.”

Whatever it is, Clint knows it well enough to continue. And one day, when the pain has faded to a dull ache and she can look back on this day without breaking down, Natasha will ask him how he knew it.

But not right now, because quietly Pepper continues with, “That’s home,” while her grip on not-JARVIS’ arm tightens even further and Steve’s arm comes up to wrap around her shoulders in comfort.

 “That’s us,” Bruce whispers into silence, finality in his tone, his hands opening and closing almost unconsciously.

There is no hum of electronics, no footfalls from the other rooms. No alarms, no distant traffic, no planes overhead. Instead there is silence is so deep it’s like a fog; cloying and clogging the lungs, inescapable.

The only human noises in the whole world come from this room.

Wanda twitches slightly, as is she’s going to grab Pietro or Carol’s arm, but instead a small sob hitches out and she curls in on herself, dropping to her knees too quickly for anyone to try and catch her.

And then she buries her face in her hands and _screams_ – screams so violently that it breaks in the middle, that it sounds as if her throat’s being rubbed raw – and a pulse of energy explodes out of her, red light chasing after it as is shatters all the glass in the room; an explosion of shards that glint and flash in the meagre light.

Pietro crouches down immediately, curling around her and whispering in to her hair and Carol and Bucky sidle forward until they too can crouch down, providing silent support and gentle hands. Red light like deep-sea fish dart across her irises and for a brief moment the room is full of light and laughter and the sound of cars passing outside. But then Pietro says “nu soră”, quiet and sad, and whatever vision Wanda was trying to make real wavers and disappears again.

“Aceasta este casa mea,” Wanda says quietly, before realising that only Pietro and Natasha understand her and repeating herself in English. “This is my home.”

“I know,” Thor replies, and in those two words Natasha can hear all the ages of the world Thor has seen; innumerable and long gone. He crouches down so he is level with Wanda and one by one each of them sit down until they are all huddled together amongst the broken glass.

“But I do not know how else to help.”

No one says anything in reply.

They are leaving tomorrow.

Natasha will hotwire some cars, or maybe a London bus because Clint would enjoy that, and she will drive them out of the city towards those ancient sites to the south west – to those places where the Bifrost can safely carry away the last not-quite-human inhabitants of earth.

“We should find somewhere to sleep,” Steve says eventually – because Steve will always be their leader, end of the world or not – and everyone nods wearily, but no one moves. Moving, Natasha feels, would be like admitting defeat; admitting that for all their high ideals, they could not save the earth as they promised to. And now there is no one to save and no one to avenge and not even anyone they can fight, so that they might die in honour and glory in the last defence of their home.

There is only this quiet retreat, this losing.

“Come on,” Natasha says when the silence has stretched too long again and it’s clear _someone_ needs to do something, “there’s a small room to the left of the main entrance. We can bed down in there.”

She looks to Thor and to not-JARVIS, who both nod and begin coaxing people up out of the shattered glass.

The room, it turns out, contains just one exhibit in a glass case in the centre, leaving a great deal of floor space free to sleep on. As the rest of them spread out their sleeping bags and blankets – brought with them from whatever far flung place they happened to be in when ‘it’ happened – Natasha watches as Carol approaches the case, flashlight reflecting off glass and picking out a tiny object seemingly floating in the middle.

“The Swimming Reindeer,” Carol reads. “Carved mammoth tusk from the rock shelter of Montastruc, Tarn et Garonne, France. Late Magdalenian, around 13,000 years old.”

She’s joined by Bucky and Steve, who peer into the glass at the tiny carved object.

“It’s beautiful,” Steve whispers, nose nearly pressed into the glass.

Carol nods, a small jerky movement, and one by one everyone turns to see the little carved reindeer, picked out by the light of several flashlights.

“All those in favour of taking it with us, say aye,” Bucky says suddenly and as one, everyone murmurs the affirmative.

With his left hand, Bucky feels along the joins in the glass case before prising off one side and reaching in to pluck the carving from its holder. It looks tiny in his shining metal hand and he cradles it like something precious before passing it to Pietro who carefully packs it into a box. He must have swiped it from one of the gift shops, moving so fast that he was back before anyone noticed he had gone. Pietro places the box gently on top of the various duffels dumped haphazardly in the corner, before returning to curl up between his sister and the wall.

Natasha curls herself around Pepper with Clint at her back, and one by one the flashlights are turned off until the darkness and silence is complete.

They are leaving tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> Erik quotes Carl Sagan; [the bit just before the Pale Blue Dot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i2y4sEQpRI). 
> 
> The first room they find themselves in is the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum. What Jane says about it is true, most of the stuff in it has no real historical value and was just in storage prior to the gallery’s opening in 2003. The second room is Room 3, a small rotating exhibition room which some years ago exhibited [the Swimming Reindeer](http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_prb/s/swimming_reindeer.aspx) as part of The History of the World in 100 Objects. The Swimming Reindeer remains one of the most beautiful items I have ever seen in a museum.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Last True Mouthpiece](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4157511) by [seratonation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seratonation/pseuds/seratonation)




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